Skulls reveal Neanderthals, and humans have had equally difficult lives

NEW YORK (AP) – Neanderthal life was not a picnic, but a new analysis indicates that it was not more dangerous than what our own species was facing in the past. ;Antiquity.

This calls into question what the authors call the dominant vision of our cousins ​​of evolution, namely that they have lived risky and stressful lives. Some studies suggest high rates of injury due to acts of social violence, carnivore attacks, a hunting style that required large prey to be approached, and the risk of significant movement in environments covered by snow and ice.

While it is true that their lives were probably more risky than those of people in today 's industrial societies, the very different living conditions of these two groups mean that comparing them is not really appropriate. said Katerina Harvati from the University of Tuebingen in Germany.

A better question is whether Neanderthals faced more danger than our species when we shared similar environments and comparable lifestyles for mobile hunter-gatherers, she said with co-authors of the In an article published Wednesday by the journal Nature.

To study this, they focused on skull injuries. They examined previous studies of fossils dating from about 80,000 to 20,000 years ago in western Eurasia. In total, they evaluated data from 295 skull samples from 114 Neanderthals and 541 skull samples from 90 individuals of our own species, Homo sapiens.

Injury rates were about the same for both species.

This calls into question the idea that Neanderthal behavior creates a particularly high level of danger, wrote Marta Mirazon Lahr of Cambridge University in a commentary that accompanied it.

But the new study is not the last word on Neanderthal trauma, she writes. This did not include injuries other than the skull. And scientists still have a lot of work to do to find the probable cause of injury and provide evidence of care for the wounded, which could give some idea of ​​the behavior of Neanderthals and former members of our species, she said. written.

___

Follow Malcolm Ritter on @MalcolmRitter

___

The Health and Science Department of the Associated Press receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Scientific Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.